Several dozen rural Missourians have been working their fannies off for at least a couple of years to rein in the abuses of CAFOs in our state. And now they’re faced with a choice, in the AG race, between what they see as Tweedle-Dee and Tweedle Dum. Mike Gibbons consistently voted to curtail the rights of counties to pass health ordinances regarding CAFOs (in ’03, ’04, and ’05) and Chris Koster sponsored SB364 in the spring of ’07, which would have eliminated that last small vestige of local control over CAFOs.

(The backstory on 364 is that these fanny-busting activists stopped that bill cold. They got their network of citizens to put so much pressure on rural senators that the bill was not brought up for a vote because it would obviously have failed.)

Having lost their bid to get Jeff Harris or Margaret Donnelly the AG nomination, the activists are retrenching. They asked each man to explain what position he’d take as AG on the authority of County Commissions to regulate CAFOs.

One of the men responded. The other is stonewalling them. And I’ve been reading the group’s online discussion of how to vote in that race.

Chris Koster agreed to meet with a small group and explain his position. Here’s Julie Fisher’s summary of what he said:

• He was handed SB 364, not because Farm Bureau asked him to sponsor
  
  it, but because his colleagues recommended him mostly due to his success
  
  in reaching a compromise with the eminent domain legislation.
• What he had failed to appreciate when he sponsored 364, was that despite some of the decent language in the bill, the part that took away
  
  our rights to local control spelled out doom for the bill and its sponsor.
• He interprets 192.300, like Jay Nixon, to mean that both county commissions AND county health boards have the authority to pass health
  
  ordinances to protect their communities, and as Attorney General, he will defend that right.
• He and Nixon, if elected, can and have worked well together. If they are both elected, they would work together to create stronger standards
  
  and serious enforcement of those standards.
• He considers most of the staff in the current Environmental Division of the AG office to be very good and thought that, as AG, he would invite them to stay on board.
• He would offer to put together a working group to address CAFO issues. (We all know that such work groups under the Blunt administration have been heavily biased toward the CAFO industry, and thus have been essentially ineffective. But Koster did say that this does not have to be a group comprised of the Farm Bureau.)
• The Department of Natural Resources has done an abysmal job, and he was highly critical of the department and its director. In fact, he acknowledges that, because of DNR’s inaction, communities and individuals have had to take on the job of trying to protect themselves.
• He said that he would strongly enforce violations of state CAFO laws and regulations.

Gibbons, on the other hand, simply doesn’t get back to this group of concerned citizens. Silence. That’s what they get.

But that doesn’t automatically incline these people to vote for Koster. One of them figures it’s “as muddled a political choice as I’ve ever faced.” Some will vote for Koster because “the enemy of your enemy is your friend”, and Gibbons, in the pocket of the Farm Bureau, is clearly their enemy.

But they don’t trust Koster. One asked whether it’s better to vote for someone you can’t trust to do the right thing or to vote for someone that you can trust to do the wrong thing. Another person mentioned having heard Koster lie on the floor of the Senate and said he votes for people on their past actions, not their promises about the future.

Still, Koster’s got the endorsement of Charlie Speers, the attorney who successfully represented a group of people in northern Missouri who sued Premium Standard Farms. Speers thought Koster would be easier to work with than Gibbons.

Let me interject here that I’m sure Jay Nixon would agree with Charlie Speers. Jay’s got to know that Gibbons will start sabotaging him on November 5th.

Anyway, some of these people will vote for Koster; others will abstain. But all of them feel that both Koster and Gibbons are political opportunists and that constant grass roots organizing for the purpose of pressuring the eventual victor is the only certain way to make progress.